orman-English Henry the Second's castle, and its three
bridges. The fine central one, of fifteen arches and a quarter of a
mile long, is a prolongation of the Rue Nationale, and has near it
statues of Rabelais and Descartes.

Balzac's father, who at the time of Honore's birth was fifty-three
years of age, was not a native of Tours. He came from Nougayrie, a
small hamlet close to Canezac in the Tarn Department and province of
Languedoc. He was, therefore, a man of the south. On the registers he
was inscribed as a son of Bernard-Thomas Balssa, _laboureur_, or
peasant farmer; but he subsequently changed his name to Balzac. Recent
investigations have disclosed the fact that--whether by his own
initiative or that of his son--he was the first to employ the "de"
before the family name, prefixing it in the announcements made of the
marriage of his second daughter Laurence.

Although of humble origin, the elder Balzac acquired both education
and position. He embraced the legal profession, and was said by his
son to have acted as secretary to the Grand Council under Louis XV.,
by his daughter Laure to have been advocate to the Council under Louis
XVI. There is no documentary proof that he held either of these
offices; but he figured in the Royal almanacs of 1793 as a lawyer, and
would seem to have served the Republican Government, although his
children subsequently asserted that he had always been an unswerving
Royalist. The family tradition was that he had become suspect to
Robespierre through his efforts to save several unfortunates from the
guillotine, and would himself have perished had not a friend succeeded
in getting him sent on a mission to the frontier to organize the
commissariat department there. Thenceforward attached to the War
Office, he returned to Paris, and in 1797 married Laure Sallambier,
the daughter of one of his hierarchic chiefs, she being thirty-two
years his junior. The next year he went to Tours as administrator of
the General Hospice, and remained there for seventeen years.

The father of the novelist was a man out of the common. A contemporary
of his, Le Poitevin Saint-Alme, relates that he united in himself the
Roman, the Gaul, and the Goth, and possessed the attributes of these
three races--boldness, patience, and health. He avowed himself a
disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considering a return to nature to
be the main condition of happiness. He shunned doctors, advocated
exercise, long walks, w